Each year, for reasons ranging from preterm labor to high blood pressure, around 700,000 pregnant women are put on bed rest. While the thought of lying in bed and "relaxing" for days or weeks on end might sound appealing, the truth is that it can be a frustrating, emotional and scary experience for women. That's made clear by a recent blog entry on the New York Times' Motherlode; in the piece, a California mom shares her thoughts on her own "confinement:"
People say “I would do anything for my child.” In our case, what I can do for this child is literally nothing. Doing nothing. I only get up for the lightest cooking and a shower, lying prone, not sitting up. I have a career, a teenager and a toddler. A household to run. And here I lie. Every instinct is to roughhouse with the toddler, pick up the floor, go to urgent work meetings, take my son to see a friend. Being intentionally indolent feels like a betrayal of self-sufficiency, efficacy, parenthood, the environment, my career. But as my other half said when I came to help in the kitchen, after a not restful day with bad results to the fluid: “Do you love this baby? Go lie down.” So I did. I worked from home, until I couldn’t do that anymore. And then I just kept still.
